For four years, my school bully called me the “Ugly Duckling” and made sure everyone else did too. Twenty years later, she knocked on my door in the middle of a storm, begging for $20. I could have slammed the door.
Instead, I handed her something that made her plead for mercy.
I learned the sound of Dorothy’s laugh before I learned the layout of my high school.
Freshman year. New building, new faces, new everything, and somehow Dorothy’s laugh cut through all of it like a knife.
I found out what it meant to be on the receiving end of that laugh pretty quickly.
“Now that one is a real ugly duckling,” she called one morning as I passed her locker. “She even waddles!”
She and her friends burst into laughter.
Other students moved away, so they weren’t walking close to me.
A week later, everyone was calling me that name. Someone even wrote it on my locker. I scrubbed at the words with a wet paper towel while passing students giggled at me.
But it didn’t end there.
A few months later, she tripped me in the cafeteria.
My tray went flying first, then me. The milk soaked into my jeans cold and fast, and for a second, I just sat there on the linoleum floor, blinking at the ceiling tiles.
“Oh, my God!” Dorothy cried out. “Are you okay?
Let me help you.”
She stood and made a show of waddling toward me. Her friends laughed first, but everyone soon joined in. She was Prom Queen, and I was just a punchline.
A teacher looked up from the faculty table, then looked away.
I gathered what was left of my dignity and retreated to the bathroom.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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